June 2017

In this issue

A field guide to business jargon and buzzwords
The corporate world often seems to have its own dialect that only the people who use it really understand. Or do they? Here we attempt to decode three popular business terms.
[from Greek khaos + Latin lux: chaos + light]
“The president and the current administration are gaslighting us.” (The Guardian, March 16, 2017)
To “gaslight,”...

Whole foods? Great in theory, but in real life inconvenient and annoying. Much better to cut them up and enclose them in plastic. Presumably that’s why the Whole Foods Market Inc. supermarket chain briefly tried marketing pre-peeled oranges in plastic containers—at least until a Twitter user named Nathalie Gordon came across the product in a California store in 2016. Her...

Hawaii, my wife and kids were shopping, and I wandered into a music store. The fellow took a ukulele off the wall, and I almost immediately fell in love with it. I grew up on the North Shore in a big family on a wooded acreage with lots of animals and music. Both my parents played the piano, and my...

One morning in early March, Igor Trninic was setting up interviews for a position in his fast-growing startup, Breakthrough Academy. A key benefit to joining the company, he told applicants, is the ability to work from anywhere. Case in point: while making those calls, the 28-year-old was lying in a hammock at a guest house on the lush, rolling grounds...

BCBusiness + Ayming
Many companies rely on bank loans, tax credits and private investment dollars to fund their growth and development. But these aren’t the only options available to you—the government is offering substantial funding in the form of grants. BCBusiness caught up with Laslo Cesar, director of finance & innovation at Ayming, to discuss how businesses can successfully plan for...

Specialty: Concrete waterproofing products whose proprietary chemical technology creates crystals that grow into the materialFounded: 1973Exporting since: 1975Proportion of total sales from exports: More than 90 per centThe story so far: Ron Yuers, Kryton’s founder and chair, signed his first international distributors in 1975, in Australia and Mexico. To fulfill his global ambitions, he would buy a one-way plane ticket...

Georgiy Sekretaryuk works in the jewelry business, but not in the way you might think. The 18-year-old Coquitlam resident, who speaks Russian and Mandarin in addition to English and his native Ukrainian, also has Asian markets in his sights. Sekretaryuk is co-founder of Cering, a wearable-technology startup that seeks to make women’s lives safer by letting them discreetly signal for...

When True Leaf Medicine Inc. applied for a licence to grow medical marijuana at its Okanagan facility, CEO Darcy Bomford checked all the boxes. He compiled a 1,500-page brief and brought on former premier Mike Harcourt, a criminal defence lawyer, as chairman. Bomford was on the eve of winning municipal approval when he filed the application—48th in line nationwide. Health...

There’s nothing like a bit of familial rivalry to fuel entrepreneurial ambitions. Freighted with growing up in a renowned B.C. real estate development family, Darryl Bosa admits taking off “to learn and make my own mistakes” overseas for nearly a decade before returning home to create a new coworking business.
“I still try to outdo my brothers,” the founder of Cmpny...

Born in San Francisco and raised in Portland, self-described urbanist and west coaster Gil Kelley became Vancouver’s new general manager of planning, urban design and sustainability in September. Kelley was previously director of planning and development for Berkeley, California; director of planning for Portland; and most recently, director of citywide planning for San Francisco, which, he says, has a worse...